A hedge fund manager’s take on that old saying about failing to learn from history…

“I learned that everything that was going on…had happened before, and that logical cause-effect relationships made those developments inevitable. My failure to anticipate this, I realized, was due to my being surprised by something that hadn’t happened in my lifetime, though it had happened many times before. The message that reality was conveying to me was ‘You better make sense of what happened to other people in other times and other places because if you don’t you won’t know if these things can happen to you and, if they do, you won’t know how to deal with them.’” – From Principles, by Ray Dalio

This is why pattern matching and the ability to understand deep structure is and always has been a key skill not only for success, but for survival as well…